Warning: Spoilers for various Fantasy & Science Fiction (depending on where you draw the line) series!
Have been watching Game of Thrones, Season 1, on DVD. Got to the scene where the bad guys burst in to take the little girl away during her fencing lesson. The fencing master, with wooden practice sword, takes down several of the bad guys. Sends the girl away and faces (with only the stub of the wooden sword) the top bad guy who is armed with big, real, steel sword.
Question: has their ever been a bad-guy/scum-o fencing master in all of Fantasy & Science Fiction?
The only other fencing master that comes to mind immediately is in Dune, when Paul is “not in the mood” and wonders if his fencing master, who attacks with vigor, is the traitor they have been warned about.
Wasn’t there a bad guy fencing master or two in the James Bond flick “Die Another Day?” I know it’s not really Fantasy/SciFi, but it’s all I got. There are other fencing type fights in F/SF like in The Princess Bride, though the big fencing scene is between two “good guys”, so that would probably not count for what you’re looking for.
Hopefully someone else will come up with something better; I’m interested in the answer, too.
Long before DUNE, the forcefield-that-stops-fast-projectiles-but-can-be-pierced-with-a-slow-enough-thrust schtick for our scrappy heroes already gave rise to the dickish Thurmond in FLIGHT INTO YESTERDAY/PARADOX MEN. (How dickish? He not only purchases slaves for the sole purpose of fencing 'em to death in his private gymnasium, but delights in doing so by “touching each of the six sections into which a fencer’s body is arbitrarily divided – a demonstration that he could kill the other at will.”)
When he finally confronts the protagonist, we’re told that our hero’s “sword leapt arrow-like in an incredibly complex body feint. But his quasi-thrust was parried by a noncommittal quasi-riposte, almost philosophical in its ambiguity. Its studied indefiniteness of statement showed that Thurmond realized to the uttermost his paramount position – that a perfect defense would win without risk.”
Actually, in The Princess Bride, I would argue that Count Rugen qualifies per the OP. After all, he damn near beats Vizzini (and severely wounds him), who has been presented as the 2nd best fencer in the movie.
Not correct. Count Rugan pierces Inigo through both arms, wounds (along with the facial cuts from when he was a child and the dagger to the stomach) which are returned by Inigo by the end of the fight.
In one of the books one of the enemy polities sends out an assassin in the form of a fencing master, and a murder is committed by someone who rigged a foil point guard to snap off. Though I am not sure you would consider the second what you are looking for.
While the fencing instructor in Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe is the protagonist, he’s a criminal-for-hire who gets a lot of innocent people killed while performing industrial espionage and playing saboteur – all in between innocuously giving feint-and-parry lessons, all before ending the novel by amiably playing extortionist.
